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LIFE OF FISH DIRECTOR ON MINIMALISM, POLITICS AND THE FUTURE OF CHILEAN CINEMA
11/09/2010
Eighty-three minutes in the life of a 30-year-old who returns home (Chile) to say goodbye to the old life he had before moving to Berlin ten years ago. The location is just one – the rooms of house in which a party is underway, during which Andrés comes to terms with the past. And the time frame limited to enter into the intimate and minimalist story The Life of Fish, directed by Matias Bize and starring Santiago Cabrera and Blanca Lewin.
“I wanted to depict honestly and sincerely, not artificially, what happens to an old couple when they see each other after ten years,” the director told CinecittàNews. “Which is why I chose to concentrate everything in time and space, keeping out all other incidental elements. The heart of film had to be the confrontation between the protagonist and his old world and the love of his life.”
The idea for The Life of Fish – which was released in Chile to public and critical acclaim and spent three months in theatres – comes from situations familiar to the director. “There are many elements that are close to my life, my world, but the film is a metaphor on relationships in today’s precarious world,” he says.
The film is clean, the emotions realistic and the camera sticks close to the characters this man and woman who were once in love and who took different directions in life, to find themselves face to face one fateful evening.
“We rehearsed a lot to get these results,” adds Cabrera, who appeared with Benicio Del Toro in Steven Soderbergh’s Che and will soon be seen in Cristiada, with Andy Garcia and Peter O'Toole. “I was helped and given confidence by the fact that Matias had a very clear idea of what he wanted to see onscreen, yet he still gave me a lot of freedom.”
The film was shot over five weeks, with “the challenge of rendering a potentially claustrophobic situation visually interesting,” said Bize.
Also noteworthy is Lewin’s performance. She will next be seen in Chile in Profugos, the first Chilean TV series produced by HBO and directed by Pablo Larrain, who is in competition at Venice with Post Mortem, a shocking film on the coup that overthrew (and killed) Salvador Allende.
“In Chile, 10 to 15 feature films are released each year,” concluded Bize. “This is a great moment for us, the funds work well and I’m optimistic about the future of our cinema.”
Michela Greco – Cinecittà News
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